Experiences with Data Distribution Management in Large-Scale Federations Bill Helfinstine Deborah Wilbert Mark Torpey Wayne Civinskas Lockheed Martin Information Systems Advanced Simulation Center 164 Middlesex Turnpike Burlington, MA 01803 781-505-9500 bhelf@lads.is.lmco.com, dwilbert@lads.is.lmco.com, mtorpey@lads.is.lmco.com, wayne.j.civinskas@lmco.com Keywords: HLA, RTI, DDM, scalability, Joint Experimentation ABSTRACT: The JSAF Federation is one of several simulation tools at US Joint Forces Command used to support large-scale simulation exercises for Joint Experimentation. Given both the large-scale nature of joint operations (i.e., theater-level conflict) and the forward-looking aspect of the Joint Experimentation process, these experiments inherently involve the simulation of many thousands of weapons systems platforms. Although some experiments are performed at an aggregated level of representation, other experiments require representation at the weapons system platform level. Two recent experiments, J9901 and Attack Operations 2000 (AO'00), required the simulation of 20,000 to 100,000 objects using over 100 federates. The HLA Data Distribution Management (DDM) service provides an abstract, application-driven data filtering capability. The JSAF Federation has taken advantage of this capability to provide a highly scalable, widely distributed simulation system. This paper discusses why DDM is important to scalability, how the JSAF Federation uses its filtering capabilities in a data-driven fashion, and the RTI features and network hardware capabilities that were used to build this system. 1. Introduction Joint Experimentation is an iterative process of collecting, developing and exploring concepts to identify and recommend the best value-added solutions for changes in the doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership and people required to achieve significant advances in future joint operational capabilities. The US Joint Forces Command supports large-scale simulation exercises for Joint Experimentation. This kind of exercise is invaluable for conducting theatre-level training in joint operation as well as for providing experimental data to evaluate the potential effectiveness of future weapons systems and strategic approaches. The JSAF federation, which is one of several simulation tools used at US Joint Forces Command, unites a diverse set of federates to conduct large-scale distributed simulation at the weapons system platform level. Because of the joint nature of the exercises, different participants bring different federates which have been developed to suit specific needs. Joint experiments tend to be conducted among geographically dispersed sites, as each participant brings local resources to bear. Thus, WANs, and their associated costs and limitations, are usually incorporated into the communications infrastructure of joint experiments. Theatre-level exercises operating at the platform level require the simulation of many entities. For example, the Joint Operations 1999–1 (J9901) exercise and the Attack Operations 2000 (AO00) exercise required the simulation of 20,000 and 100,000 platforms respectively [1]. These exercises were designed to investigate human performance in the scenario of Critical Mobile Target detection, given differing levels of computer analysis support, human-machine interfaces, communications capabilities, and attack capabilities. 1.1 Joint Experimentation requirements and its data The exact amount of data transferred in a simulation is contingent upon the design of the scenario used by the federation. In order to construct a scenario that demonstrates joint operations in an interesting fashion, it is a requirement that the geographic area played on be quite large. A corollary is that the number of vehicles played be sufficient to populate such a large expanse of terrain sufficiently, particularly when longrange radars are played. Without sufficient background clutter to hide in, a Critical Mobile Target scenario cannot be realistically simulated. Furthermore, since it is important to find individual vehicles in such a scenario, it has become a design requirement that these simulations happen at the platform level of representation. This leads to the conclusion that joint exercises must publish very large volumes of dynamic data, either in the form of changing attributes or ongoing interactions. Based on these data requirements, as well as the fact that we run with human operators as part of the experiment, our federation designs have resulted in a very DIS-like design [1]. We do not use the time management services of the RTI, since we must run in real-time in order to include the human operators. We do not use the reliable messaging services of the RTI, since we have such a large quantity of data to send, and the overhead of reliable messaging is too high to handle the load. And most importantly, each federate must filter out as much data as possible in order to keep from becoming overloaded. Joint exercises also require the use of many federates. While the JSAF federation has succeeded in populating the battlespace with the needed entities using a limited number of federates, many additional federates are needed to directly support the exercise participants. Even more importantly, joint exercise participants operate at a high level, and the federates they use provide a theatre-level display of the battlespace. For example, the display may represent the entire sum of situational awareness for a given force. Thus, these federates may need to know the state of all (or at least a significant fraction of) the entities in the federation execution. This aspect of joint experiments turns out to be a major constraining factor. These display federates need to respond in a timely fashion to commands (e.g., pan and zoom) from users. It is very challenging for the federates to remain responsive at the theatre-level, where the state of thousands of entities may need to be displayed simultaneously. Thus these federates need to be spared unnecessary processing whenever possible, and at the same time be able to change their interests quickly and efficiently. Without any filtering, simply processing all the incoming state information of a large theatre-level exercise would completely occupy a federate. Thus, it is incumbent upon distributed systems meeting the need of joint experiments to reduce the total amount of irrelevant information which must be processed by federates. 1.2 Declaration Management One mechanism provided by the RTI, which on the surface appears promising in the context of joint experimentation, is static subscription-based filtering offered by the Declaration Management service. If a division of responsibility between federates can be reflected in the FOM, Declaration Management can be used to form disjoint publications and subscriptions. In this case, the flow of simulation data between disjoint federates could be greatly reduced or even completely suppressed. One might think that at the theatre level, the responsibilities of the federates would be disjoint in domain (e.g., air vs. sea), in function (i.e., logistics vs. attrition) or in other dimensions. Perhaps some federates in a joint exercise would be so loosely coupled that there is little or no need to exchange simulation data. However, such a scenario does not explore the joint qualities of the scenario in a meaningful way. Thus this solution does not fit well with the problem domain. Furthermore, in practice, the federates that most need filtering (theatre-level displays) must subscribe to the most simulation classes for potential display. While DM can be used to filter out some traffic, it does not offer an adequate solution for the system bottleneck. 1.3 Data Distribution Management The other service offered by the RTI for relevance filtering of simulation data is the Data Distribution Management service. Because this service provides dynamic value-based filtering, rather than static hierarchy-based filtering, it is well suited for federates which may need to display any entity, but at a given time will likely only be viewing a subset of them. Although the exact nature of DDM has changed during the development of the HLA specification, the basic capability has remained the same. DDM allows the federate to dynamically specify abstract regions of interest that are overlap-matched against out-of-band data sent along with the object attributes or interaction parameters in order to filter the simulation data presented to the federate. For example, in J9901 and AO00, theatre-level displays would subscribe for only those vehicles whose type and location was of interest to the user. As the user panned or zoomed the map or selected different kinds of vehicles to display from a menu (red/blue, aggregate/actual, tracks on/off, etc), the federate dynamically updated its subscription. With many federates of this nature (fifty or more) participating in the exercise, the interests of the federation as a whole were updated quite frequently. 1.4 IP Multicast One technology that has been used quite heavily to implement best-effort DDM services is IP multicasting [2] [3]. The basic unit of abstraction of IP multicasting is known as a multicast group, which is simply an IP address that falls within a specified range of values. When a machine wants to receive data sent to a particular multicast group, it subscribes to that group. Data is sent to a particular group by a sending machine, and all machines subscribed to that group will receive that data. On LAN technologies such as Ethernet, the network inherently supports multicasting, and different network interfaces can handle differing quantities of filtering in hardware. Additionally, wide area networks are capable of using IP multicast through the use of additional subscription and routing protocols that modern routers support, albeit with the higher latencies inherent in WANs. There are a number of different algorithms that have been used to implement DDM, some of which do a good deal of computation to reduce network bandwidth requirements. However, these computations can become a bottleneck in themselves. For example, it has been shown in [4] [5] that dynamic configuration of the connectivity grid between federates to provide optimal filtering of data is an NP-complete problem. Joint experimentation, with its large numbers of entities, federates, and even sites, is particularly vulnerable to inefficient algorithms, and therefore a non-polynomial algorithm such as the Multicast Grouping method is not appropriate for such exercises. Thus, the approach used to implement DDM in the RTI is critical for performance of joint federation executions as a whole. DDM is required to reduce simulation data processing, which is a known constraint, but at the same time, the complexity of the implementation of DDM must not in itself become the bottleneck. Luckily, the RTI is free to implement heuristic approaches to DDM that reduce but do not necessarily optimize data flow. These may offer much improved performance profiles. Also, DDM can opt to filter irrelevant simulation data at many different points: at the source (if no federate is currently interested), at a router (if no remote federates require forwarding of the simulation information), at the network interface (if DDM has appropriately arranged multicast addresses for filtering at the receiver) or in the receiving RTI software itself if necessary. Past implementations of DDM have leveraged this flexibility to provide meaningful reductions in required federate data processing at manageable computation costs. The use of DDM has enabled larger scale exercises than were previously possible with DIS-style state update broadcasts, and requisite application-level processing. The following sections of this paper describe our experiences using different implementations of DDM to successfully conduct these large joint experiments. 2. Best Effort DDM implementations using IP Multicast The ability to send data to a dynamically controllable subset of possible receivers is a powerful tool that can be used in a number of ways to implement the DDM abstraction. However, there are a number of limitations of the current implementations of IP multicast that constrain its use. In particular, the total number of multicast groups that can be used simultaneously is less than 6000 in current (2001) commercial router implementations. Furthermore, the amount of dynamicism of group membership is limited as well, with current routers being capable of less than 1000 subscribes or unsubscribes per second from all the client machines. In the routers and switches used in the J9901 and AO00 exercises, those limits were only 3000 groups and 300 subscription messages per second, which proved even more limiting than current technology. Thus, the subject of just how to map the DDM Region and Routing Space abstractions onto multicast groups has been and is still a subject of a good deal of research [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]. Furthermore, each design used to implement this mapping has its own limitations and drawbacks. There are two general categories of such mappings, statically assigned grids and dynamic assignment based on connectivity requirements. 2.2 Sender-side overlap calculation and receiver grouping 2.1 Statically Assigned Grids The simplest way to map abstract regions onto multicast groups is to divide the entire routing space into an n-dimensional grid, and assign a multicast group to each n-dimensional grid square. Therefore, when a message is sent, the interests of the receivers are implicitly taken into account by the simple expedient of moving their multicast subscriptions to cover the groups that are overlapped by their subscriptions. This is the approach taken by the STOW RTI-s prototype, as well as current versions of the RTI-NG 1.3 [10] [14]. This design has the advantage of requiring very little computation to do the mapping, as well as requiring no extra communication between the senders and receivers. Therefore, its scaling characteristics are very good, which is a major advantage to joint experimentation. However, its disadvantages can be problematic. One characteristic of a typical exercise is that the density of objects across the space is very non-uniform, with rear areas containing only logistics vehicles, and scattered battles containing a large number of platforms in a small space. Therefore, to get good coverage of regions of high density, a large number of grid cells are wasted on regions of low density, where they are much less necessary. Since multicast groups are a limited resource, this can be a critical problem. One way of working around this limitation is to provide a mechanism to specify areas of higher grid density within the grid [15]. This allows more efficient use of the limited multicast group resource, at the expense of significantly reduced dynamicism in the simulation scenario. Further, this design leads to scalability problems in the presence of non-point publication regions. In order to satisfy the receipt requirements, the data must be duplicated and sent to each group overlapping the region, which leads to obvious inefficiencies. Finally, this design inherently results in federates receiving more data than they asked for. Since regions are implicitly expanded to grid boundaries when subscribing and publishing, each federate will receive more data than it asked for, and receive-side filtering must be done to remove extraneous data. This effect can be reduced but not eliminated by careful selection of grid densities, but that carries its own penalties of reduced dynamicism. In this design, each federate lets each other federate know about its subscription regions. This lets the sending federate calculate exactly who wants to receive the data being sent, and lets it send the data to a multicast group that is joined only by the subset of federates that should receive it. Each federate is required to calculate overlaps when any region changes so it can subscribe to groups in a way that possible senders can reach it. This is the design implemented by DMSO RTI 1.3 [16]. This design minimizes the amount of data received by each federate since it does perfect matching on the source side. Furthermore, it minimizes the network traffic for the updates, since it will only ever send each message once. However, the overhead incurred by this scheme is very high. Each subscription must be sent to all the federates in the federation, which negates the bandwidth advantages of the actual data flow, particularly in the joint experimentation setup, with its highly dynamic interest changes. Further, calculation of region overlap is an algorithm that scales poorly with number of regions [17]. Additionally, this scheme scales poorly with the number of federates. In fact, in the worst case, the number of multicast groups required is N3 with the number of federates. Since multicast groups are a limited resource, this leads to situations where either perfect filtering is lost or the routers are overwhelmed. 3. Large-scale Joint Experiment use cases In the Joint Experimentation world, there have been three large-scale exercises that have heavily depended on DDM to provide the scalability required by the scenarios. The STOW97 ACTD, J9901, and AO00 have all scaled distributed platform-level simulation to levels previously unattained. In particular, each system produced an order of magnitude more objects than any single federate could accept. See Figure 3.1. See also [18] [19] [20] for more details. Event STOW97 J9901 AO00 Federate Count 300 100 150 Vehicle Count 3600 20000 100000 Object Count 7000 40000 160000 MaxObjects PerFederate 400 5000 20000 Figure 3.1. Acceptable object counts vs. total counts The only way these levels of performance were attained was through the use of DDM. Since each of these exercises was run using RTI-s, the implementation used was a statically gridded layout, with high-resolution inset grids. See [21]. Furthermore, each of these exercises was geographically distributed across a number of sites, with multicast filtering hardware performing a lot of the DDM filtering before the traffic reached the operating system. See Figure 3.2 and 3.3. Figure 3.2. Sites for STOW 97 together and intermixed during the course of the exercise. J9901 and AO00 were attack operations scenarios where a ground war had not commenced, and all ground units were OPFOR and neutral, and BLUEFOR units were aircraft and ships. A very large part of the network-level load in the latter two exercises was due to the presentation of the BLUEFOR sensors' perceived truth information across the network. Due to these differences, the gridding assignments were reconfigured heavily for each exercise. In STOW97, a great deal of attention was paid to the geographic layout of all the grids, with heavy tuning over a period of several months. In J9901, it became more important to differentiate force alignment as a first filter, with geography becoming a secondary but still important factor. In AO00, finer control over the perceived truth data became the most important factor, and more attention was paid to that. One of the most important factors in each of these exercises was the fact that we had knowledge of the algorithm that the RTI used to map regions to multicast groups. Using network monitoring tools, we were able to easily identify areas that required tuning. Further, since this assignment was controlled by the RTI's RID file, we could quickly and simply try further refinements simply by distributing a single data file to the participating machines. Since we believe that automatic tuning of multicast group assignment is not feasible in a joint experimentation scenario due to efficiency constraints, such manual tuning is very important, and needs to be possible in a flexible, convenient fashion. This sort of configurability and visibility is an area that we believe needs to be explored further by RTI developers. The use of RTI-s and static inset grids has performed extremely well for our purposes. The static assignment means that the overhead of doing DDM is minimal. In tests performed using the sender-side squelching approach, we have not been able to replicate the scalability that is provided by the static grids [22]. The fact that inset grids are available has meant that we can tune our implementation very carefully for each exercise and provide very close to optimal filtering without the overhead of the actual overlap calculations. Figure 3.3. Sites for J9901 and AO00 The major differences between the three exercises were due to the differing scenarios in play. STOW97 was a ground-heavy force-on-force exercise with very high concentrations of ground forces that came 4. Future We are currently preparing for the Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) experiment. This exercise provides even greater challenges than previous joint experiments, due to two major factors. For MC02, we will be running with dozens of new federates, none of which have ever implemented DDM before, and some of which are still implementing their HLA interfaces. The amount of development required to indicate to the RTI what the simulation's interests are is not insignificant. Scheduling pressure may not allow us to use DDM to its full capabilities. Also, MC02 will be the first large-scale platform-level joint experiment to be run with HLA v1.3-compliant federates. Due to corner cases in the way non-DDM and DDM federates interact, the 1.3 specification binds each attribute to a single routing space, which does not allow the use of separate spaces for a single platform class, or even a set of related platform subclasses of a single base class. To get around this limitation, we will be using the "hyperspace" concept detailed in [22] which allows the use of a dimension of a common routing space to represent the routing differentiation that we previously used routing spaces to represent. This does have major drawbacks, though. It leads to incredible confusion, both on the part of the implementers, and on the part of documenters. It carries a great deal of complexity, most of which was previously contained within the RTI, and which is now the requirement of the application to implement. Combine that with the fact that there are dozens of new federates, each of which needs to implement the same code, none of which share a common codebase, and the problem becomes very difficult indeed. Furthermore, since we are assuming that RTI-NG will be used as the RTI for MC02, and since it implements uniform static grids without multiple density insets as its multicast mapping scheme, we may not be able to assign multicast groups in an efficient fashion. Given these restrictions, the MC02 federation may not be able to take full advantage of DDM. However, some use of DDM will probably be required, since the scalability requirements of the exercise likely cannot be met by a static DM design. 5. Caveats regarding the use of DDM When doing scenario design and configuration of a federation, it should be possible to allocate federates to physical sites in such a way to minimize the amount of cross-site interaction required, and therefore minimize the amount of data that is sent across a WAN. However, it is often the case that the roles of the sites are defined based on the organizational hierarchy of the project running the experiment, or the organizational hierarchy of the simulated units, rather than the likely interaction patterns of the units. This makes the exercise much easier to explain, control, and analyze, however, it also makes it impossible to minimize WAN communications. For example, if it was decided that one of your sites would simulate/publish all of the OPFOR, it is likely that every site that simulates BLUEFOR will need to receive all of the data from that site, and that site would need to receive all of the data from all the BLUEFOR sites. If it were possible to simulate different regions of the battle at different sites, WAN communications would become much less of a bottleneck. For an example of this strategy, the STOW97 exercise included a separate area of operations well to the south of much of the battle that was simulated in the United Kingdom. Due to there being relatively little interaction between the two areas of operations, the transatlantic communication was quite minimal. For after action review purposes, it is often a requirement that huge amounts of data be logged to permanent storage devices for later processing. Therefore, the approach used to log the data is important. Optimally, a local logging approach could be utilized that doesn’t affect the network at all, with each federate sending data directly to a local disk. However, this concept of local logging has a number of practical difficulties, particularly in the mechanics of collecting and integrating the logs from each machine. Therefore, centralized logger federates are often used, which results in a single site receiving all the data in the federation, and a single machine having to cope with all the data being produced. Another situation that hampers effective DDM usage is the presence of data hungry federates, which is similar to the logger problem described above. Often, as is the case for MC02, certain federates are one-box-solutions that need to consume the entire simulated situation in order to accomplish their task. These federates receive no or little benefit from using DDM, and in fact could cause negative effects depending upon how DDM is implemented in the RTI. A major issue that we have not addressed directly is that we have been enjoying state-of-the-art networking hardware and networking design expertise. Even with such support, we have had a great deal of difficulty configuring the many pieces of hardware required to handle the quantity of multicast groups we use and the rapidity of change in subscriptions our systems require. Newer technology is reducing the number of boxes in use, which should help reduce some of the configuration load. However, not all the configuration is in the network. Some is in the operating system software, and some is in the actual NIC card in each machine. We have used 3Com 3C905B and 3C905C network cards, which have the best hardware multicast implementation available in a COTS Fast Ethernet card, with a Linux OS kernel that uses a 3Comsupplied driver to activate the multicast support, as well as IP multicast hash tables similar to those described in [23]. The HLA 1.3 specification added a new requirement that binds attributes to routing spaces. This means that our previous habit of routing data to different spaces in a human-understandable fashion is no longer possible [22]. As noted above, we get around this through methods that require much more complexity on the part of the federate developer, and which are much less intuitive to us. Further, the IEEE 1516.1 HLA specification changes the way DDM is done again, but in a fashion that lends itself to the “hyperspace” implementation as well [24]. We therefore believe that the federation being assembled for MC02 will be relatively easily transitioned to 1516 when it becomes feasible to do so. 6. Conclusion Joint Experimentation requires the continued scaling up of exercises until reality can be matched down to the platform level. Since simulation requirements continue to outpace advances in networking technology and processor speed, DDM will continue to play an important role in meeting the needs of the Joint Experimentation community. We have had great success in the use of statically assigned grids to implement DDM, and we encourage its further use and development. Additionally, if the extra bandwidth and computation requirements of source-side squelching can be reduced to more reasonable levels, it could become a much more powerful expression of the DDM capability, but its current overhead renders it unsuitable for Joint Experimentation. We are working towards the Millennium Challenge 2002 experiment, which will lead into the Olympic Challenge 2004 experiment. We believe that DDM will be a very important piece of the success of these experiments, although the challenges in implementing it are quite daunting. There are a number of important factors that need to be taken into account when planning the use of DDM in an exercise. Most importantly, the design of the exercise scenario usually determines the dataflow requirements, and the effectiveness of DDM can be significantly reduced if care is not taken. We are very interested in developments in the DDM services implemented by future RTIs. We are currently not particularly worried about the differences in DDM introduced by the IEEE 1516.1 spec, since it was taken into account in the implementation of DDM we are using. Finally, DDM has been a primary factor in the success of the STOW program in particular, and of platformlevel Joint Experimentation in general. 7. References [1] M. Torpey, D. Wilbert, B. Helfinstine, W. Civinskas: “Experiences and Lessons Learned Using RTI-NG in a Large-Scale, Platform-Level Federation” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 01S-SIW-046, March 2001. [2] S. Deering: “Host Extensions for IP Multicasting” IETF Network Working Group, RFC 1112, August 1989. [3] W. Fenner: “Internet Group Management Protocol, Version 2” IETF Network Working Group, RFC 2236, November 1997. [4] K. Morse: “An Adaptive, Distributed Algorithm for Interest Management.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, May 2000. [5] M. Petty, K. Morse: “Computational Complexity of HLA Data Distribution Management” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 00F-SIW143, September 2000. [6] J. Calvin, C. Chiang, D. Van Hook: “Data Subscription” 12th Workshop on Standards for the Interoperability of Distributed Simulations, 95-12060, March 1995. [7] J. Calvin, D. Cebula, C. Chiang, S. Rak, D. Van Hook: “Data Subscription in Support of Multicast Group Allocation” 13th Workshop on Standards for the Interoperability of Distributed Simulations, 95-13-093, September 1995. [8] S. Rak, D. Van Hook: “Evaluation of Grid-Based Relevance Filtering for Multicast Group Assignment” 14th Workshop on Standards for the Interoperability of Distributed Simulations, 96-14106, March 1996. [9] D. Van Hook, S. Rak, J. Calvin: “Approaches to RTI Implementation of HLA Data Distribution Management Services” 15th Workshop on Standards for the Interoperability of Distributed Simulations, 96-15-084, September 1996. [10] J. Calvin, C. Chiang, S. McGarry, S. Rak, D. Van Hook, M. Salisbury: “Design, Implementation, and Performance of the STOW RTI Prototype (RTI-s)” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 97S-SIW-019, March 1997. [11] A. Berrached, M. Beheshti, O. Sirisaengtaksin, A. deKorvin: “Approaches to Multicast Group Allocation in HLA Data Distribution Management” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 98S-SIW-184, March 1998. [12] K. Morse, L. Bic, M. Dillencourt, K. Tsai: “Multicast Grouping for Dynamic Data Distribution Management” Society for Computer Simulation Conference, July 1999. [13] K. Morse, M. Zyda: “Online Multicast Grouping for Dynamic Data Distribution Management” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 00F-SIW052, September 2000. [14] S. Bachinsky, R. Noseworthy, F. Hodum: “Implementation of the Next Generation RTI” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 99S-SIW118, March 1999. [15] S. Rak, M. Salisbury, R. MacDonald: “HLA/RTI Data Distribution Management in the Synthetic Theater of War” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 97F-SIW-119, September 1997. [16] D. Van Hook, J. Calvin: “Data Distribution Management in RTI 1.3” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 98S-SIW-206, March 1998. [17] M. Petty: “Geometric and Algorithmic Results Regarding HLA Data Distribution Management Matching” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 00F-SIW-072, September 2000. [18] L. Budge, R. Strini, R. Dehncke, J. Hunt: “Synthetic Theater of War (STOW) 97 Overview” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 98S-SIW086, March 1998. [19] R. Dehncke, T. Morgan: “Virtual Simulation and Joint Experimentation: STOW and Joint Attack Operations” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 99F-SIW-079, September 1999. [20] A. Ceranowicz, P. Nielsen, F. Koss: “Behavioral Representation in JSAF” 9th Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation, 9TH-CGF-058, May 2000. [21] S. McGarry: “An Analysis of RTI-s Performance in the STOW 97 ACTD” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 98S-SIW-229, March 1998. [22] D. Coffin, M. Calef, D. Macannuco, W. Civinskas: “Experimentation with DDM schemes” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 99S-SIW053, March 1999. [23] B. Helfinstine, D. Coffin, M. Torpey, W. Civinskas: “Low Cost Hardware for Large Scale Entity-Level Simulation” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 98S-SIW-230, March 1998. [24] S. Bachinsky, F. Hodum, R. Noseworthy: “Using the IEEE 1516.1 RTI C++ API” Simulation Interoperability Workshop, 00F-SIW-062, September 2000. 8. Author Biographies BILL HELFINSTINE is a Staff Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin Information Systems Advanced Simulation Center (LMIS-ASC). Bill is the implementer of the JSAF DDM scheme. Among his many duties, Bill is currently the lead developer of the RTI-s implementation. DEBORAH WILBERT is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin Information Systems Advanced Simulation Center (LMIS-ASC). Deborah is currently implementing tools that support FOM Agility in HLA compliant federates. Her experience in distributed simulation includes other HLA-related design and development efforts, environmental simulation, CGF development, scalability research, protocol development, and C4I simulation. MARK TORPEY is the lead developer and lead integrator of the Joint Semi-Automated Forces (JSAF) Computer Generated Forces (CGF) simulation system for USJFCOM’s JSAF Federation Joint Experimentation team. He is a Staff Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin Information Systems Advanced Simulation Center (LMIS-ASC). WAYNE CIVINSKAS is a Senior Manager of Lockheed Martin Information Systems Advanced Simulation Center (LMIS-ASC). His responsibilities include advanced concept development of simulation system architectures, technologies and techniques that support distributed simulation. Wayne's current focus is on transition of distributed simulation technologies from the prototype stage to full-scale engineering development and production programs.